


fall upon, light upon

by pollyrepeat



Series: Early Years AU [2]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (2012)
Genre: AU, M/M, Multi, Origin Story
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-25
Updated: 2013-01-25
Packaged: 2017-11-26 20:11:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 16,669
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/653971
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pollyrepeat/pseuds/pollyrepeat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Clint rejoins SHIELD, has a series of agency-sanctioned adventures, and despairs of ever getting Phil to notice him romantically. He might have known Phil better before he knew so much about him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	fall upon, light upon

**Author's Note:**

> This is, at last, the sequel to [still officially lost](http://archiveofourown.org/works/385871). You can probably just jump in, but I'll tell you right now: there are at least five jokes that only make sense if you've read the first one.
> 
> Thanks to Neve, who was really wonderful about listening to me weep gently over my keyboard and incredibly encouraging, and also to Jones, who wields a mean machete and shouts heartening things while doing it. <3

It starts out as a gap year, but Clint doesn’t set foot on American soil for another five.

//

He has a lot of sex. A _lot_ of it. He shoots an arrow at Mount Kilimanjaro, tries surfing, stops eleven muggings, guest stars in three different circuses, gets arrested twice, attempts to learn how to play guitar, successfully picks up the harmonica, and mails twenty-two postcards to one person. He discovers that now that he can eat whatever he wants, whenever he wants, he mostly wants regular meals full of vegetables. 

He spends a total of forty-four days in the company of one Phil Coulson, who appears out of nowhere in whatever city Clint’s staying in, dressed appropriately for the weather and looking like he’s always been standing just around the corner, waiting for Clint to discover him.

One bright, sunny day, Clint rounds a corner and finds Fury waiting for him, instead. Fury is most definitely not dressed for the weather: black leather, all the way; he looks pretty much exactly the same as the last time Clint saw him. Clint’s brown paper bag of breakfast pastries gives an obnoxious rustle when he clutches at it, reflexively.

“Everything okay, uh, sir?” Clint says, like it’s perfectly normal for Fury to track him down. It’s not. Clint’s pretty much assumed he’d never see Fury again unless someone died or the world was ending or something. “Um. Every _one_ okay?”

“Everyone’s fine.”

They stare at one another for a few more moments. Clint gets dirty looks from people forced to walk around him, but no one seems to give Fury -- six foot something, enormous black flappy coat, eye-patch -- a second glance. “Have you enjoyed yourself, Barton?” Fury asks, at last.

“Yeah.” Clint’s enjoyed a lot of things over the years, but more specifically, over the last two months he’s been enjoying an extremely attractive redhead in his shitty month-to-month rental room, and he’d been sort of hoping they’ll pick up where they left off last night when he gets back with breakfast. Although -- “Is Phil -- did Coulson come with you?” Clint asks, carefully nonchalant. Fury frowns like he knows exactly how many times Clint’s beaten off while thinking about Coulson (safely oblivious on the other side of doors and walls and eventually, oceans).

“I came,” a voice says from behind him, and even as Clint’s choking back his helpless snort of laughter at the choice of words, a little bubble of warmth climbs its way up Clint’s spine and lodges itself in his chest, like emotional heartburn. Or something.

Phil strolls up, all rolled up shirt-sleeves and exposed forearms and almost-smiles and some sort of minor head wound. Wordlessly, Clint reaches into his paper bag, pulls out a pastry and a napkin, and offers them to Phil, accomplishing the dual purpose of being calmly helpful while also circumventing Clint’s initial instinct to throw his arms around him and --

“Thanks,” Phil says, taking the napkin in one hand to dab at the trickle of blood winding its way down past his ear, and using the other hand to start munching on the pastry. Nobody gives Phil a second look, either; Clint’s beginning to seriously wonder if he is, in actuality, standing alone on the street talking to himself.

“Trouble?” Fury says.

Phil’s face twitches minutely; Clint translates it into a wince. “The asset was not amenable to joining us today.”

“Why am I not surprised,” Fury mutters. “Well, Barton, congratulations: you’ve come to the … attention … of several special interest groups.”

“We’re handling it,” Phil says.

Fury shoots Phil a look that Clint has no idea how to decipher. “Time to come back to the fold.”

"If you want," says Phil.

Clint is reminded of that dog in the made-for-TV movie he watched last week; she’d had to choose the person she wanted to stay with, for keeps. It involved a lot of shouting of “Here girl! Here!” while the violins swelled, but he isn’t entirely certain of the outcome. He and Tasha had played a game that involved taking shots any time someone cried, and they got very drunk, very fast, and then very distracted by other things.

“Barton,” Fury says, formally, “this is an offer with an expiry date: we would like you to join the agency. There will be paperwork, there will be medical benefits, there will be training, and we’ll probably even let you shoot things. We could use someone with your talents.”

“Right now I get to shoot things without the sort of medical benefits you need when people regularly try to put a bullet in your head,” Clint says. He’s gonna say _yes_. He’s pretty sure he can play hard-to-get for at least five minutes before he folds.

“It really is up to you,” Phil says, and when Clint turns, he’s smiling -- his real smile, not the one he uses to get what he wants. The Secret Agent Sunglasses make it difficult to get a full read on what he’s thinking, but Phil lifts his hand and puts it on Clint’s shoulder, squeezing gently.

“There’s a -- there’s someone here I want to wrap things up with, first.” Clint says. His mouth has gone dry; it’s too hot to be standing around outside in the sun.

“That’s a yes?” Fury says.

“Yeah, it’s a yes,” Clint says, clearing his throat. One whole minute. _Embarrasing_. Phil squeezes once more and then takes two steps back; they grin at each other, briefly, while Fury visibly rolls his eye. “I just need to say goodbye to my -- friend.” Three of the twenty-two postcards he sent to Phil included obnoxiously explicit details about his sexual adventures, but whenever Phil’s actually standing in front of him Clint suddenly finds it difficult to even acknowledge he’s sleeping with people. Even when he’s been sleeping with the same person for the last two months. Maybe especially then.

“I stopped by your place on my way here,” Phil says, wadding up the slightly bloody napkin and tossing it in a trash bin. “There was no one there.”

“Oh,” says Clint, and when they stop by to pick up Clint’s stuff, all of Tasha’s is gone, like she’d never been there at all.

They never said they were in it for the long haul or even the medium haul, and hey, look at Clint, picking up everything to fly back to the States with the best friend and worst crush he’s ever had but only sees sporadically. It still makes something clench up in his gut. She must have moved the minute he closed the door behind him.

//

Fury doesn’t catch the same flight as them -- “Some business to finish up here first,” he said -- and Clint accidentally falls asleep on Phil’s shoulder on the plane ride back instead of staying awake to have serious grown-up discussions about the agency’s Very Important Work or maybe just play the “what have you been doing since the last time I saw you?” game. Clint compiled a whole handful of stories that make him look really smooth, but instead of sharing them he drools all over Coulson’s suit jacket.

Phil shakes him awake when they land, looking amused. “Do you always do that?” he asks. “I seem to remember you being very adamant about your personal space.”

“Just tired, I guess,” Clint says. The world feels unpleasant and unreal; Phil’s presence beside him is also unreal, but, well. Pleasant.

“Coffee before anything else, then,” Phil says.

The base is different than he remembers. It’s not actually the same _base_ ; this one is larger, roomier, and, Clint suspects, more secure. There’s certainly more visible security personnel, all wearing the same old black uniform, but Clint still spots a few familiar faces sitting around tables in the mess hall. Ho and Lommer, who snuck by a few times with alcohol and card games when Phil wasn’t around; Smalls, who’s squinting at Clint over his sandwich and most definitely remembering that time Clint tumbled out of a drop ceiling: Smalls broke Clint’s fall, and Clint broke Smalls’ nose. Clint can see it’s still crooked from all the way across the room.

“Coffee,” Phil says, arriving back at the table with two trays and incidentally cutting off Smalls’ line of sight to Clint. “Sandwich. It’s noon here; might as well try to start getting back into this time zone.”

“Greeeeat,” Clint says, and Phil smiles at him, again.

"We’ll go over your training schedule once we’re done eating,” he says. “Nothing too serious for the next couple of days, since we’re home safe and nobody’s trying to kill us.”

“Are you in charge of training?” Clint asks, and then stuffs a sandwich in his mouth so he doesn’t have to look at Phil’s face while he answers.

“I -- no,” Phil says. “I did four months on a training rotation and then Fury pulled me out before I could finish destroying an entire new generation of recruits.”

“Something you’re _actually bad at_ ,” Clint says, incredulous. “This does not compute for me, Coulson. You were in charge of me for a whole year and neither of us died.”

For a moment Clint thinks the conversation is over, both of them munching away on slightly stale Wonder Bread turkey sandwiches, but then Phil says, almost defensively, “That was different.”

Clint wants to ask, _what was different?_ , but can’t quite get the words out. Clint at seventeen didn’t have any precedent for someone like Phil; in the beginning, with Phil’s ushering-to-Medical and his don’t-fall-off-the-roof-or-else, Clint stuck him in the box in his head labeled “Barney”, or maybe “Trickshot and the Swordsman”, but as time went on and Clint continued to fail to make Coulson lose his temper and break Clint’s other arm, it became increasingly clear that Phil didn’t fit inside those boxes at all.

Phil is something else.

Sometimes, usually when Phil is right next to him and yet so vastly beyond Clint’s reach, Clint wishes none of it had ever happened. That Phil never got assigned his shit-scared seventeen-year-old self, never looked after him or signed his paperwork. He daydreams about being recruited to the agency as a stranger, walking in off the street and meeting Phil as an equal, right from the start.

“If all goes according to plan,” Phil says, after a moment, “my field supervisor is going to put the two of us on the same strike team.”

//

Clint’s not sure what anyone expected of him, but after a promise like that he basically throws himself into training. 

He also throws himself back into life with Phil; they don’t live together anymore, but now they’re often on the same continent, in the same _city_ , and they go for greasy spoon diner runs at odd hours of the night, where they talk easily for hours that are still somehow less time than Clint wants to spend with Phil, and Clint “accidentally” bumps his foot into Phil’s more times than he probably should.

“Sounds like you’re doing well,” Phil says. His mouth is full of waffles. He smiles a crinkly-eyed smile at Clint from across the table. There’s a bit of syrup at the edge of it, and, like every terrible romance-novel-left-behind-in-a-hostel Clint has ever read, he wants desperately to lean across the table and lick it off for him.

“I’m doing great,” Clint agrees, clenching his hands into fists in his lap, out of sight. “I love training.”

That part is even mostly true. Even the boring parts. He fills out requisition paperwork like a pro, qualifies on every firearm the agency can throw at him, and obediently races through endless obstacle courses with crowds of baby agents. Coulson shows up sometimes to heckle, in between long missions off to parts unknown that Clint isn’t cleared to know about; Fury shows up once and two juniors go to the infirmary with injuries that can basically be boiled down to: threw themselves off a wall while trying to show off; failed to stick landing.

The obstacle courses are still better than the equally endless classes on strategic thinking, world history, political science, technology. Clint is apparently expected to be able to assess which buttons to press in order to topple warlords and dictators, both by using projectiles and by _talking_. Talking has never been Clint's strong-suit, but part of training involves going for more visits to psychologists in a three-month period than he ever had to do in the entire year he lived with Phil.

"Do you have to visit the psychologists?" Clint asks. He props his feet up on the dashboard of the car, glancing over at Coulson sitting in the driver's seat. He's not totally sure why Coulson's here -- this is a cake-walk stakeout that's ostensibly still part of Clint's training, but maybe this is a test to see how well they work together in the field. Coulson's just back from a two-week mission somewhere warm; he brought Clint a postcard with a white sand beach and bright blue water and “Hello from --” stamped in cheerful red letters, the actual place names scratched off with a set of keys. There's a bruise by Phil’s right ear, spreading under his jaw and visible in the fading sunlight when he tilts his head, but he isn't moving with any visible stiffness.

"Of course," Phil says. "Everyone does."

"What do you talk about?" Clint asks, feeling daring. Sometimes Clint has to talk about Barney, or Duquesne and Chisholm, or Clint's five-year jaunt, or Phil.

Phil knows nearly all of that, but Clint still doesn't know anything about Phil's childhood and hardly anything about his current personal life. Clint knows Phil has an apartment off-base -- probably needs it mostly to store his ever-growing collection of Captain America paraphernalia -- but Clint's never seen it. Something always comes up.

"I think our guy's coming out," Phil says, rather than answering. "Side door. Spot him?"

Clint leans forward, blinks. "Yeah, I see him. What'd he do?"

"Above our clearance level," Phil says. "Think you can keep eyes on him while I follow in the car?"

Clint waits until their guy has rounded the corner, then pops his door open and unfolds himself onto the sidewalk. "Piece of cake," he says, even though he’s about to jog off into the suburbs and those are never _not_ scary, and heads off without closing the door or looking back.

It goes south in a hurry: the mark starts to get squirrelly in the middle of an empty street and suddenly sprints in the direction of a nice-looking house that looks exactly like every other house on the horseshoe-shaped street. For a moment, it looks like the guy’s going to dart around the back, but instead, he vaults the veranda railing and crashes straight through the picture-glass window. There’s a shriek from inside, and even after all this time spent drilling, Clint’s initial instincts are still _go help_ , not _let home-base know what’s going on_ , but he stutter-steps to a stop instead of breaking into a run, half a block away and holding, and pauses just long enough to say, “Base?”

“Affirmative,” Base says, which confirms what Clint’s suspected and there are other eyes on the ground aside from him and Phil. “Mission parameters have changed. Go deal with the situation.”

Clint’s sprinting before the radio’s clicked back to silence; the noises coming from the house are getting louder and louder and there are beginning to be neighbours poking their heads out of windows and front doors. Oh yeah. This is gonna be fun. He does a low-down scramble up the steps to limit line-of-sight and flattens himself against the exterior wall beside the shattered window. A woman with grey hair is eyeing him with deep suspicion from the doorway one house over, phone in one hand, cord stretching back into the depths of the house, and frying pan in the other.

He really hopes no one has a camera. The agency gets pissy whenever someone gets their picture in a paper, even if the paper has CONSPIRACY somewhere in its name and said picture is one page over from a feature piece titled, “Cattle Mutilation: Alien Invasion or Invisible Beasts? THE SHOCKING TRUTH.”

If he were the type to scrapbook, Clint thinks to himself, he would definitely have a scrapbook of all the times Phil’s been featured in those conspiracy rags.

Clint peers around the edge of the window. In training, this is called “THREAT ASSESSMENT”. In Clint’s real actual life, this is known as “not getting shot at (again).”

The threat is still inside. The threat is in a living room full of lace doilies and several dozen firearms, laid out neatly on white fluffy towels on couches and armchairs and the carpeted floor, which is also, incidentally, where the threat is: curled up with his hands protecting his head, which a very angry grey-haired lady is doing her best to kick in. Clint actually has to double-check that grey-haired frying pan lady is still standing in her doorway, because apparently the occupants of the rows of identical houses may all look alike, too.

“Where’s my _money_ , jackass?” Doilies and Firearms Lady -- not to be confused with Frying Pan Lady -- is shouting. “Two months and nothing --” vicious sneakered kick -- “and then you crash through my motherfucking window?”

Clint _loves_ his job. Suck it, pretentious gap-year backpackers speaking seriously about finding meaning in their lives in leaves of grass and poetry! This is goddamn poetry. Oh look hey, it’s Agent Coulson.

Phil does a little wave from the side window. Clint’s pretty sure that window’s just hanging out half a story above the ground without any convenient handholds, so it’s pretty impressive that he’s peering in, almost nonchalantly, with at least one hand free.

“Hands up, hands up,” Clint bellows, gun leading the way into the room. And then, feeling almost gleeful, “Government agent! Hands up!”

When Phil comes through the window, he introduces himself to the people face-down on the floor as an agent of the “Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement, and Logistics Division,” said all in one breath, smoothly, as though this is something he says every day.

The rest of the team shows up to collect the two suspects and the evidence as the sun dips fully below the horizon, peeling up in the unmarked black cars that hit the nostalgic equivalent of Clint’s funny bone. Phil gets up from where he’s been crouching over the man, asking questions that are probably above Clint’s pay-grade in a polite, calm voice, and goes to meet them at the front door. The scandal must be all over the neighborhood by now; whatever cover story gets cooked up is going to be a riot.

“You know,” says Clint, when Phil reappears, “way back in my day, we just called it The Agency.” The capitals are audible.

“Security protocol for dealing with civilians,” Phil says. He tilts his head in a _come here_ motion and waits until Clint’s jointed him in the hallway before he adds, “A long and meaningless name makes us appear ineffectual, unthreatening, and above all, forgettable. Government bureaucracy, as opposed to shadowy international intelligence organization. We go by SHIELD to people we’re willing to make more of an impact on.”

“How many times did you have to practice it in the mirror before you got it right?” Clint wonders idly. “Strategic Homeland Enforcement -- no, wait --”

“Intervention, Enforcement, and Logistics Division,” Phil says. “It didn’t take me nearly as long to memorize as it took the task force to actually came up with it.”

“Seriously?” Clint says.

“Two psychologists, a linguist, a former two-star general, a PR professional, and an accountant.”

“-- walked into a bar,” Clint says, unable to resist.

“Ha,” Phil says, narrowing his eyes like he does when he wants to laugh for real but definitely isn’t going to give Clint the satisfaction.

Once Clint’s delivered his report to the head agent on scene, he makes his way to the front door himself, leaping over the veranda because it looked fun and he restrained himself the first time around. When he hits the sidewalk he glances back: there’s Phil, standing in the doorway, cast in the shadow of the lights streaming from the house. Clint’s gut clenches and he opens his mouth, still reckless with adrenaline, to ask Phil out to eat greasy bar food or invite himself back to Phil’s place, but --

“See you tomorrow,” Phil says, waving again, and turns to go back inside the house.

//

The stakeout marks the abrupt halt of Phil’s international missions; he’s still sent out on domestic calls, but nothing overseas. The furthest afield he goes is _Canada_ , and even that’s only for four days. Clint’s not supposed to know anything about Phil’s missions, but just because he’s not exactly a people person doesn’t mean he can’t work a water cooler.

“Have you been _grounded_ , Coulson?” Clint asks, after two weeks of seeing Phil every day. Coffee, the occasional greasy spoon diner dinner, meetings, in the hallway; he runs into Phil constantly.

“No,” Phil says. He pauses for a moment, which means something that Clint hasn’t figured out, yet. Phil always pauses for a reason. “It’s a rotation,” he offers. “One round on, one round off. It’s a ... it’s something like a break.”

“Huh,” says Clint, and takes a deep breath. “Well. Do you want to grab supper from the Ethiopian place down the block?”

Phil does, but there is no inviting of one another back to either of their places. Apparently they are public space friends, these days. Maybe that’s just as well.

Despite the arms-length, Clint’s already embarrassingly large and long-lasting crush blooms overnight into a full-blown Hey There Clint Barton, You Are Totally Fucked For Life situation. On the plus side, he has Hey There Clint Barton situations a _lot_ , so at least this isn't anything new.

//

By the end of that initial year together, he and Phil were practically living in each other's pockets, but once Phil pushed him out of the proverbial nest and Clint took off for parts unknown, weeks and months would go by with no contact at all, and that was _fine_. The first month, okay, sure, that was unpleasant, sometimes; he landed in Prague and stumbled through a series of hostels, wandering through markets and eating a lot of food that even a circus kid with an unconventional upbringing had never heard of before. Clint had been alone a lot, in his life, but Prague was the first time he got to be alone by himself.

Month two was Bratislava. Halfway through it, Clint clattered down from the room he was renting, and took three whole minutes to realize Phil was sitting at the communal kitchen table. He was drinking coffee with the couple who ran the place and a couple of the backpacking kids who slept all day and stayed up all night.

Clint finished fixing his toast and a cup of coffee before he sauntered over and sat down next to Phil, bumping their knees together under the table. It wasn’t for purposes of maintaining a cover, it was just -- the other option was throwing himself in Phil’s direction for a hug. Phil had tolerated that once and it had been _very nice_ , but would be really embarrassing now if it turned out Phil was here for work, or out of a sense of duty to make sure Clint hadn’t accidentally killed himself or gotten into a situation (again) where a lot of other people wanted to kill him (again).

“Anything planned for the day?” Phil asked, after the backpackers slouched off to bed and the owners returned to the check-in desk to deal with the crowd of twenty-somethings who’d just come in, waving beer cans and passports around in the air.

“You interrupting or joining?” Clint said, tipping his chair back so he could get a better look at Phil. He looked … good, although the last time Clint had seen him he still had stitches in his forehead and circles under his eyes. There was a scar across his temple where the stitches had been, very small and faint, and a strange rush of fondness hit Clint all at once, a mix of _I know that story_ and a desire to reach out and smooth his thumb over it.

“Joining,” Phil said, meeting his eyes. “If that’s okay?”

“It’d be pretty shitty of me to turn you away once you came all the way out here,” Clint said, and then, “Jesus, Coulson, you really need to ask?”

“Well, you know me,” Phil said, and Clint _did_ , better than any other person in Clint’s life, and that was how Clint ended up at the Slavín Memorial, staring out over the city and playing increasingly competitive rounds of Eye Spy that required Phil to break out binoculars in order to stay in the game.

Parting ways with Phil at the end of the whole eight days he stayed was harder than the previous nearly-two-months combined, and it was the same in the second year, and the fourth, and the fifth, like missing Phil was some sort of weird homesickness that hid inside his brain and only came out when Clint poked at it too hard or Phil was about to appear or about to leave.

The homesickness has subsided now that he's back in Phil's company for something resembling long-term, but this just means that now Clint _knows_ things about Phil’s regular, day-to-day life. He knows that Phil’s picked up a 2PM coffee habit. Clint’s rediscovered that Phil’s a badass in a suit with a predilection for experimental weaponry and standing orders with thirteen different antiques hunters. He knows that Phil's found a fondness for pre-packaged foods that are all basically pale imitations of the kind of strike-you-dead snacks Clint grew up eating at the circus: room temperature powdered-sugar donuts, twinkies, hot dogs from gas station rotisserie counter stands. "You disgust me," Clint says, watching Phil devour a ding dong with casual disregard for his body, but Phil just holds out the second package.

The homesickness is gone because Phil is _right here_ , but it’s morphed into something else. Something more dangerous, Clint thinks, and he knows from danger.

//

The day that Clint passes his final training assessment (“A good agent is never done!” the training agent said, shaking his fist at Clint before stamping [PASSED] all over the relevant paperwork), Phil buys him a chocolate cake and then drags him to meet Agent Opryshko.

“She’s a good field commander,” Phil’d said, between bites of chocolate cake, but Phil has a tendency to be diplomatic.

She _is_ a good field commander, but five minutes with her in the cafeteria and Clint can tell that she’s one of many at SHIELD who have a tendency to approach interpersonal relationships off-the-clock in exactly the way they approach missions while on the clock. She’s a good field commander, but she field commands her entire life. It’s not a bad thing, actually, so long as you know the score. Fury’s the same way.

Like Fury, Opryshko is an embarrassing four or five inches on Clint. Unlike Fury, Opryshko also wears heels on occasion, when the situation doesn’t warrant combat boots, and she’s not above getting right up into people’s personal space so that she can use that height to loom.

“So,” she says, from right above Clint’s head. “HR informs me that you’re mine for the next couple of years, barring death or dismemberment on either of our parts.”

“Yes, sir,” Clint says.

“I remember you from when you were a kid,” she adds, taking a step back and sitting down with her tray, again. Clint is gratified that she’s using the past tense when referring to him being a kid, not least because Phil is standing right here. “You drove my mortal enemy into early retirement, so, thanks for that.”

Clint actually can’t think of who she means, immediately, but -- “Robbins? The head of security?” He remembers Robbins being a pretty decent guy, all things told. He sent him a postcard or two, and thinks he recalls hearing about his retirement from Phil a few years ago.

“Robbins,” Opryshko says, dark. “Let us never speak his name again.”

He glances at Phil, who shakes his head, slightly. “Okay,” says Clint.

“Well, grab a seat,” she says. “I’ll send you a meeting memo so I can introduce you to the rest of the group and we can brief you on some of the long-term pies we’ve got our hands in.”

The rest of the regular team consists of Agent Falla (serious-looking; glossy black hair that she perpetually wears in a thick braid tossed over her shoulder; explosives) and Agent Grieve (serious-looking; has a sort-of-mullet that the rumour mill believes is a product of a mission last year and that he liked it so much he decided not to get rid of it; piloting and communications). Clint files their appearances and their specialties away into the box in his head marked “Teammates????”

It’s a brand new box. He made it especially for this occasion.

The five of them do two milk-runs over the first month, working out the kinks in the system before SHIELD feels comfortable deploying them into deliberate life-or-death situations (as opposed to the accidental ones). The worst that happens is Grieve breaks three of his fingers when Phil jumps off a fire escape (according to plan) and lands on his hand (not according to plan).

“You were _out of position_ ,” Phil says. He doesn’t hiss it, but judging by his body language it’s a close thing.

“Yeah, well, fuck you,” Grieve says, which is the same thing he’s been saying for the last fifteen minutes.

“Children, children,” says Opryshko, but SHIELD must think that’s good enough.

Their first actual mission involves Clint sitting up high in a tree, sniper rifle in hand. He watches Falla and Coulson slink across a dark yard, aiming themselves at a three-story, twinkly-light-draped house, the only spot of light for miles on an isolated country estate. All its windows are bright, and all its doors are open: it’s a party. It’s a party full of people with more money than god, and Phil, undercover as something other than a government agent, for once, got to put on the nicest suit SHIELD money could buy.

Clint may have cornered him outside their hotel earlier that evening. Just -- his _shoulders_ in that thing, Jesus Christ. His _ass_. “What the fuck _is_ this,” Clint had demanded. “Is this a tuxedo? Can you keep it?”

“No and no,” Phil said. “Didn’t you pay attention in Fancy Undercover Clothes class?”

“No,” Clint said, meaning, _no one looked like this_ , and Phil definitely caught that second part, because Clint could see the red, creeping up over the curve of Phil’s ears in direct contrast to the expression on his face that said butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth.

Phil is a total sucker for compliments in a way that was wholly unexpected and yet incredibly satisfying, like Clint has a special super-power for giving him instant self-esteem boosts.

“Thing One and Thing Two have arrived,” Agent Grieve says, just as Falla and Coulson hop a final hedge while somehow managing to keep from spilling the half glass of champagne they’re each holding. They disappear into the crowded house, bumping against one another in a way that says, DON’T MIND US, WE JUST POPPED OUT TO HAVE SOME SEX. No one gives them a second glance.

They’re in the house for seventeen minutes before the screaming starts.

“That wasn’t on the agenda,” Opryshko mutters in Clint’s ear. Shadows dash back and forth in front of the lit windows on the second floor, frenzied instead of the leisurely movements from just a moment before. The chaos spreads to the third floor and then the first, a small but growing crowd beginning to stream out the door and stumble into the darkness of the garden spread out before them like a hungry mouth.

“Isn’t it lucky that there are no trained killers here waiting to pick these people off,” Clint says, still peering through the scope. One of the faster party guests crashes through a hedge and passes under Clint’s tree with looking up. “Boss?”

“Hold on,” Opryshko says. “No one’s called for backup yet. Give them another two minutes.”

The twinkly lights flicker, ominously, before going out altogether. The house lights immediately follow. It’s a new moon, the sky full of whispy patches of clouds. As Phil would say: _Well, it’s dark._

Clint’s eyes adjust faster to changes in light than normal people’s do, he knows. It’s saved his life more than once. He blinks, focusing on nothing in particular, and waits as the dim outline of the house becomes visible against the slightly-less-dim sky.

“Grieve’ll retrieve your rifle,” Opryshko says. “Go.”

“Don’t need to tell me twice,” he says.

“Go,” Opryshko says, ‘cause she thinks she’s funny. He abandons the rifle in the tree and hits the ground rolling, badly startling a woman in a dress that rustles noisily when she moves; she whirls on him and strikes out with a fist that Clint dodges. Not breaking speed, they each continue in their original directions.

Falla meets him at the door. Her dress is still impeccable but there’s splash of blood on one of her shoes. “Outside players,” she says. “I neutralized one of them and Coulson’s hunting the second inside.” Her expression shifts, turns exasperated. “Our mark is somewhere out in this mess.”

“Great,” Clint says, taking a reluctant step away from the house, but she shakes her head and shoves a thumb over her shoulder, pointing back inside.

“Go on in,” she says. “The guy shoved me into the path of danger and I have a hankering to take care of him myself.”

Clint still doesn’t need to be told twice.

The house is eerily quiet, for a place that still holds at least two people trying to kill each other. Clint picks his way through shadowy rooms, trying to avoid stepping on champagne glasses and puffy crab cakes. 

Opryshko says, “I’m sticking you and Coulson on the same channel,” and his comm is immediately full of scuffling noises. The occasional gasped exhale of someone having the breath beaten out of them. Clint is, suddenly, acutely aware of the knife at his hip and the pistol in his hand.

“Location,” he says, but there’s a thump in his ear and a floor above him, almost right over his head. “Never mind.”

By the time he gets upstairs and tumbles into the right room, it’s all over. For a moment his heart stutter-stops to a halt in his chest, before he registers that Phil’s the one who’s still standing, silhouetted by the faint light streaming in the window. There’s a man on the floor, unmoving. 

“Mind your step,” Phil says. He rummages in his pockets and pulls out a little flashlight, clicking it on and aiming it at the body. He looks up, then, and says, “Barton?”

“Yeah,” Clint says. There’s a lot of blood on the floor. It occurs to him that he’s never seen Phil actually kill someone before; he’s lethal, Clint knows, and moves much faster than his appearance would suggest, but every other time Clint has seen him in action, his orders have been ‘injure’ rather than ‘kill.’

Coulson eyes him from across the body. He opens his mouth like he’s going to say something humiliating and reassuring, and Clint says, “Need help moving the body?” in a way that is not blurting or stressed out at all. Phil has a little gash on his forehead and a set of bloody lines scored into one hand that look a lot like the result of someone’s fingernails, but he’s upright and foolishly more concerned about Clint than about himself.

“Yes, thank you,” Coulson says.

“Who is this guy?” Clint says.

Phil doesn’t make eye contact this time, busy pulling a knife out of the man’s thigh. “I don’t know,” he says. “I’ve never seen him before.”

Sometimes Clint thinks he knew Coulson better before he knew so much about him.

//

Seven missions in, Opryshko says, “Take the shot, Hawkeye,” and Clint does, no hesitation. Half a mile away, a man falls down. There’s screaming through the comm in his ear until Opryshko mutters “Christ, that’s noisy,” and cuts Coulson’s feed from the open team line as soon as he says, “Shot confirmed.” Through the scope, Clint can see Phil jogging nonchalantly away from the scene, streaming away with the increasingly panicked crowd of people torn between helping the fallen man and, as they see the mess Clint’s made of his head, running for the proverbial hills.

Slowly, Clint reaches up and thumbs his mic to mute. He lies quietly for a few moments, assessing. It doesn’t feel like it did with Trickshot. Clint had thrown up -- not entirely due to Buck stomping on Clint's arm, although that didn’t help; Clint didn’t know anyone was going to die, and couldn’t stop it. It’s not even like throwing knives at Trickshot, feeling dizzy and hurt and protective and believing down to his core that being the cause of his death would make him feel better, but holding off on the kill-shot because he didn’t know how Phil would react.

Clint took this mission knowing someone was going to die, and that it was his job to make sure it happened. He doesn't feel like throwing up. Instead, he feels a little chilly, a little hungry. His heart thumps along, slow, steady enough that he can still find the space between beats.

“Team Two approaching,” Opryshko says. “Keep eyes on them, Hawkeye. Notify me of anything suspicious.”

Clint clicks the mic back on. “Affirmative,” he says, and resumes his post.

Team Two approach in their stolen police uniforms, load the body in the fake ambulance, and take off for the ubiquitous warehouse at the edge of town, where they’ll rifle through the man’s pockets and take ownership of the floppy disc full of information about a group known as Hydra.

“Good work, team; radio silence until 1900 or everything going to shit, whichever comes first,” Opryshko says, and then the radio clicks to indicate she’s switched off from the group broadcast and over to one of the sub-lines. “Vintage approaching you for rendezvous. Keep an eye on him.”

That’s weird. “Uh, sure thing, sir,” Clint says, wrinkling up his face like he would if she were standing across from him instead of all the way across town. “Will do.” Maybe she misspoke; “keep an eye _out for_ Coulson” would make much more sense. Methodically, Clint disassembles his rifle, then packs it up in the neon sports bag, underneath the set of smelly gym clothes and worn white sneakers. His arm trembles, and he stares at it until it stops. He did a really good job today. From behind him, there’s the crunch of gravel under someone’s feet.

“Come on,” Phil says, and holds out his hand to help Clint up. His grip is warm and Clint's own hands feel unpleasantly cool and damp in comparison; Clint lingers just a little too long, squeezing just a little too tightly, and Phil doesn't let go when he's finally standing. Phil’s not a civilian; he knows that Clint did a good job today. He’s not afraid of what Clint could do to him. "Barton?"

"We gotta bug," Clint says.

Phil's still not letting go. Clint doesn't particularly _want_ to let go, but it will probably make walking awkward. Not to mention climbing down the fire escape ladder. 

"Clint?" Phil says, readjusting his own gym bag over his shoulder. It's slightly less garish than Clint's, but only slightly. Phil’s wearing clothes that aren't his, but he always, always looks like himself.

"Yeah," Clint says, and makes his fingers relax their hold. Phil's expression doesn't change, exactly, but he doesn't let Clint pull away -- instead, he tugs a little until Clint's arm is draped over his shoulder, like Clint's the one who's giving Phil a sort-of-hug, instead of the other way around.

"Okay," says Phil.

"I'm fine," Clint says, a few minutes later, once they're safely back on the ground instead of a half-constructed high-rise. They wander down the street together, bumping shoulders and ugly gym bags gently; close enough that Clint could reach out and catch Phil's hand again, if he were feeling brave enough. There are sirens wailing a few blocks away, but they're speeding back toward the scene of the crime, not anywhere near Clint's nest or the safe-house.

"I'm glad," Phil says; Clint waits until they've located, gotten into, and cleared the three-room apartment before he says, "That's it?"

To his credit, Phil doesn't blink at the haphazard conversation style. "That's it."

And... that's it.

Phil doesn’t question Clint’s ability to do his job, or his mental health; all he does is say, a week later, “I’m still here if you want to talk,” one hand on Clint’s arm. They sit side by side in the same greasy spoon diner where they met -- or, well, it’s not the same one, but it has the same gold-flecked tabletops and the burgers make Clint think “home” -- and Phil lets Clint lean against his shoulder instead of keeping a careful distance, safely on the other side of the table.

//

Phil shows up at Clint’s dorm room eight times in the next month, bearing variations on a theme of snack foods and COPS reruns. The first time it happens, Phil walks into Clint’s monthly poker game with the security guys, and spends an awkward hour making small talk with them and acting like he hangs out at Clint’s place all the time -- 100% not true -- and Clint, feeling bold, rests his combat boot gently against the top of Phil’s black sneakers, under the table and out of sight, and leaves it there for the duration.

The second through seventh times are just the two of them, and it’s _ridiculous_ ; this isn’t anything they haven’t done before, except having Phil in his own space is doing something strange to Clint’s head and also his libido. Phil on his couch, and touching Clint’s stuff, licking his lips and glancing over while Clint is innocently watching TV; Phil smelling like Clint’s hand soap and dozing off five feet from Clint’s bed; Phil choosing to stay instead of keeping Clint at arms-length.

By the eighth time, Clint bites the bullet and blurts, “Is this what you thought it would be?”

Phil makes the same face he made that time Clint dragged him through Russia in a big furry hat and spent ten minutes rearranging Phil's limbs to take the perfect picture with a seven-foot-tall stuffed bear. "What?"

"You're not -- This isn't how I --" Clint _tries_ to use his words but so often it turns out like this. Words are not generally Clint's closest buddies. "You're different than I expected. Working with you is different than I expected." He wants to say: it's better than I'd dared to hope.

"You didn't think we'd be good at this?" Phil says. His shoulders are a stiff tight line in Clint's peripheral.

"I thought you would have a harder time with, you know." Clint gestures with the coffee scoop and spills grounds all over the linoleum. "You were my _legal guardian_ for a whole year. I didn’t want you to feel … responsible … for me."

"Clint, I trusted you to watch my back when I _was_ your legal guardian. We were partners." Phil turns around, watches him steadily. Clint wants to peel him out of his t-shirt and press his hands to Phil's chest, where there might or might not be chest hair; wants to unzip his jeans and take Phil's dick in his mouth. He wants to know what Phil tastes like.

“Partners.”

“Equals,” Phil says. “ _Friends_.”

Friends. Phil standing in a doorway, shadow in front of him, light behind. “Nothing’s changed, Clint.”

"Nothing?" Clint says. His voice sounds like Phil’s footsteps on the roof, that one day, crunching through dust and gravel.

Phil takes a step back, and then a step forward, and then stops. “Okay,” he says, and this time when he moves forward there’s no stopping; it’s Phil’s hand on Clint’s shoulder, the other against his waist, fingers dipped down past the edge of Clint’s cargo pants, inside, brushing against his hip.

Clint’s vision narrows down to the curve of Phil’s ear; the angle of Phil’s body against his, leaning in and pressing warm and solid. Clint’s back is to the wall, and that’s just fine. He has no room to regain his own space, but no desire for it, either, and he presses a kiss at the edge of Phil’s jaw, just by his ear, the same spot as a long-ago bruise.

“Not nothing,” Phil says, tilting his head back to give Clint better access.

“Something,” Clint says, barely certain of what he’s saying, anymore, and half the word is swallowed up in Phil’s mouth. “Did you --” he starts, when he can breathe again.

“Yes,” Phil says, “yes, Clint, yes, years.”

“Why _years_ , though,” says Clint, “all you had to do was ask, and I would have --”

“I didn’t want to take advantage,” Phil says. His breath hitches at the end of it, although that may have more to do with the location of Clint’s hands than the sentiment. But he says, “Partners?” again, like it’s important. Like it’s the most important.

“Partners,” Clint agrees, not a question anymore but a statement of fact. 

Phil sucks a bruise onto Clint’s neck and unzips Clint’s pants when he jerks his hips forward. The first press of Phil’s hand, warm fingers pulling Clint’s dick free, is enough to make Clint throw his head back -- forgetful of the wall behind him. His head bounces gently off it and he’s about to laugh when Phil’s other hand comes up and cups the back of Clint’s head, cushioning. “Careful,” he says, and thankfully doesn’t seem to notice when Clint’s heart bursts right open in his chest.

//

Opryshko takes one look at them the next morning and says, “Oh, hell.”

“Sir?” Clint says, innocently, but his traitor face refuses to wipe away the smile that’s been lingering there since he woke up and found Phil still beside him, fast asleep, the bare skin of his arms and his knobbly knees and his chest and his ass all visible and _touchable_. Clint’s allowed, now. He’s been invited in.

“Sir,” Phil says. His usual muppet face is firmly in place. He’s also leaning his shoulder against Clint’s, for no other apparent reason than that he can. He called Clint “beautiful” last night. Beautiful! Clint had needed to bury his face under the pillow until he could handle looking at Phil again without giggle-snorting hysterically or blurting something awful like I LOVE YOU.

Falla passes by, an enormous black plastic case swung over her shoulder, and says, “You just lost me fifty bucks. I picked fifteen years in the When Will They Finally pool. You couldn’t have waited?”

“Who lost -- oh, _yes_ ,” Agent Grieve shouts, from inside the plane. “I totally picked one year!”

“It’s been fourteen months,” Opryshko calls back. “We all agreed that under two years you had to pick the month! That’s how it worked for Willoughby and Lee.”

“That’s also how it worked for your divorce from Robbins,” Falla agrees, and ducks into the plane before Opryshko starts shouting, Phil and Clint apparently forgotten, shoulders still pressed together.

“That went well,” says Phil.

Fury’s gotten wind of it by the time they hit home tarmac again, post-mission. They’re hustled down the hallways, through the debrief, and straight into his office. He sits them down, fingers steepled, and stares at them levelly across the desk. "This is a shovel speech," he says.

Phil puts his head in his hands. Clint's tempted to do the same, but he also wants to see Fury's face when he actually _delivers_ the shovel speech, because his imagination is providing some interesting possibilities and he's curious about whether any of them could match up to reality.

There's a long silence in the room, and then Clint ventures, "The speech, sir?"

"That was it," says Fury.

It's actually pretty effective.

"Thank you," Fury says. "This isn't the first time I've delivered it. Don't fuck up my organization, gentlemen. That shit tends to run uphill, and I'm busy enough that I'd prefer not to have to take time to save asses that shouldn't have needed saving in the first place."

"That's not what I expected," Clint says, once they've "Yes, sir"ed their way out of the room and taken refuge in an empty conference room to regroup.

"Fury's a big picture kind of guy," Coulson says. This is work space, so when he levers himself onto the table next to Clint, he presses his shoulder against Clint's but doesn't go any further than that. "Did I ever tell you what he called me once?"

"Hmm?" Clint says, inching his knee closer to Phil's.

"A 'herder of cats'," Phil says. "I'm pretty sure my future at this agency is going to involve a lot of going home late and going grey early."

"Or bald," Clint offers, just to be a jackass. "Baldness run in your family?"

"Yes," Coulson says, sour, "and yours?"

"Dunno," Clint says, and feels Phil subside into stillness for just a moment, still pressed against him, so he adds, "I hope Barney's lost all his hair" just to see if it'll make him laugh.

Phil says, “Come home with me tonight,” once he’s caught his breath again.

//

There’s a framed picture on one of Phil’s bookshelves: the two of them in the hospital, matching dazed expressions on their faces. Their beds are pushed close together; the rectangular night-stand between it turned sideways, its drawers inaccessible. Clint says, “Huh.”

Clint is, actually, all over Phil’s apartment. The giant bear picture is sitting next to the couch; there’s a little box of dog-eared postcards on the lower shelf of Phil’s glass-topped coffee table. Clint doesn’t feel _instantly at home_ or any bullshit like that, but --

“Make yourself at home,” Phil says. He waits patiently while Clint pokes around to his heart’s content, providing occasional commentary (“a gift from my mother,” and “those are the Captain America shelves”). When Clint’s circled through the living room and the kitchen and the washroom and the study and opened all the closets and cupboards, he takes Clint’s hand and tugs him into the bedroom to explore that, as well.

It doesn’t happen immediately, but over the weeks and months, Clint’s toothbrush migrates over from his dorm, as do most of his clothes. His first bow, increasingly unsuitable as he continues to put on muscle weight. The occasional mementos, bits and pieces of his life that became important despite his continued resistance to put down roots, to seek out permanence in places that didn’t have Phil in them.

One night, after Phil’s gone to bed, Clint carefully pulls out the Captain America comic he stole -- was _given_ \-- and puts it back amongst Phil’s collection for safekeeping. He goes to bed and discovers Phil’s stolen all the covers again, and so he claws some back for himself and smiles up into the dark when Phil rolls over in his sleep and sticks his nose in Clint’s neck and presses an arm over Clint’s chest. 

//

They’re pretty much the dream team.

//

Or, well.

“You are all _fuck ups_ ,” Opryshko moans. This is, in fact, true, but the whole team is incredibly successful at turning their (usually not literal) pratfalls into the equivalent of a commercially successful late-night comedy show, and Clint and Phil, working in tandem, are the best at it.

“We’re fucking amazing,” Clint says, tossing a crowbar to Phil without looking. There’s a fleshy noise as it smacks into his palm, and then a series of ominous creaking sounds as Phil applies it to the edge of the door.

“We are,” Phil agrees.

“I have a whole lot of paperwork that says otherwise,” Opryshko says, falling silent again as Clint follows Phil into the employees-only maze-like back corridors of the library. It’s another party; Clint has kind-of-sort-of attended more parties in the last year than perhaps the entire rest of his life. Granted, he usually doesn’t get to partake of the champagne and cake and tiny pieces of meat and cheese on sticks, but on the other hand, he doesn’t have to try to make small talk or wear a tie. It evens out.

“See you on the other side,” Clint says, giving a little wave, and Phil makes for the second floor while Clint takes the stairs all the way to the sixth, where the balcony gives open air access to every floor below it. Clint’s the eyes in the sky again, watching out for the rest of the team as well as a woman of unknown providence who supposedly holds the keys to a biology lab that’s been doing some very interesting, very disquieting work somewhere in northern Canada.

Twenty boring minutes pass as his stomach rumbles, and he’s just wishing someone actually would bring him some tiny pieces of meat and cheese on a stick when a prickling at the back of his neck makes him freeze. 

“Clint.”

Slowly, slowly, he turns. There’s someone moving across the floor toward him, someone who knows his real name and moves like she’s thinking about murder. 

It’s Tasha.

Her hair is blonde now, not red, and she’s wearing a long, slim, colourless dress to match. In the half-light, she looks like she’s not entirely there. Clint wishes so, so much that she wasn’t.

“I --” he starts, but she talks over him, taking one striding step to the side and stopping while she’s still safely out of reach, back pressed to the balcony railing, even as he takes three steps away from it.

“Where’s your partner,” she says. Her voice is low, urgent, at the right volume to carry to Clint and not reach the hundreds of people milling below. “I saw him earlier, Clint, and we don’t have a lot of time. Don’t lie. You know I can tell when you’re lying.”

There are a lot of things falling into place for Clint, slotting together in his head and making an unpleasant mental racket. The Tasha standing in front of him is not quite the Tasha he saw last, charming and deadpan and oh-so-carefully careless. “I don’t --”

“Your height,” she says. “Thin build. Dark suit; tie with blue stripes. Looks like a wealthy accountant. _I saw him_. I want to help you, Clint, but if he sees me he’s going to try to kill me.”

“You’re in the game,” says Clint. “You’re -- who do you work for? Tasha, _what the fuck_?”

“We _don’t have time_ ,” she says, again, but doesn’t make any move to come closer. The way she holds herself is -- Clint always just figured she was like him; they both had histories they never shared, but there was something about her that spoke to him, like to like. Now, though. Now she’s no longer hiding, and he can place her stance, the way she’s watching him. This is someone who deals in violence.

Like to like. He squares his own stance, and brings up his gun. “Who are you?”

“I’m still a friend,” she says. “You have talent, Clint. I was to assess your suitability; my former employer needs people like you. People with aim. Who know how to be loyal. ”

“Former employer,” Clint says. “Former?”

“We parted ways shortly after I met you,” Tasha says. “I thought -- a partnership. You and me.”

“But -- you _left_ ,” Clint says. That’s not what he intended to say. _A partnership to accomplish what?_ , he thinks, and isn’t sure he wants to know the answer.

Tasha smiles a sad smile at him. “I wouldn’t have,” she says, “but I had a rude awakening in the form of a man with a gun. He broke into our home, while I slept in our bed.”

Clint has a sudden, vivid memory of watching Phil toss a bloodied napkin into a trash bin, cool and calm and _lying_ , and his stomach roils. His arm remains steady. His aim has never betrayed him.

A noise from the direction of the shelves draws both Clint and Tasha’s attention; Phil is standing at the edge of them, just a little out of breath, gun in his left hand and knife in his right. Phil looks at Clint, looks at Natasha just visible past Clint’s shoulder, and Clint can see the exact moment Phil realizes what’s happening. Clint has finally won the “make Phil have an expression” game, in the worst way possible.

“Congratulations on surviving this long,” she says, looking directly at Phil. “Most in your position, well. Don’t.”

“Don’t hurt him,” Phil says. He doesn’t ask Clint to move.

“Why would I do that?” says Tasha.

“You’re the Widow,” Phil says. A statement of fact.

“Not so different, you and I,” she says.

Phil looks past Clint’s shoulder at Tasha, the Black Widow, Natalia Romanova, and he doesn’t look at Clint at all when he says, “No, not so different.”

“Thank you for your honesty,” she says, sketching a little bow, head bent low as though she has no concerns about taking her eyes off of either of them, but as she straightens up she topples simultaneously backwards, going over the railing and presumably heading for the floor below. By the time Clint and Phil rush to peer over the edge, there’s only a brief flash of her dress before it disappears out of sight on the main floor. There are screaming guests milling back and forth. Again. Clint turns to look at Phil.

“I think we might have a fight when we’re finished this op,” he says.

“Fair enough,” says Phil, looking momentarily pale and ill, which suits Clint just fine, since that’s exactly how he feels himself.

“Team Two, report,” says Opryshko.

“Encounter with the Black Widow,” Phil says. “We’re fine.”

“We’re finished here, but you’ll understand if I’m not thrilled about you heading straight back to us,” says Opryshko, with only a barely perceptible pause.

“We’re not compromised,” Phil says, and rattles off a string of numbers and letters to prove it before clambering heavily to his feet again. Clint follows, after a moment, and he continues to follow Phil back into the access hallway, and all the way back to the rest of the team. 

Clint is a grown-up, and these days he’s a professional, and so he saves his bewilderment and his gut-churning hurt for hours and hours, until he and Phil are safely at home, staring at one another across the dining room table.

“So,” says Phil.

“You want to tell me what that was?” Clint says.

“She wanted to get us out of the way to finish whatever she was there to finish. She was lying.”

“That’s nothing I didn’t get from the mission debrief. Why didn’t you tell me about her in the first place? You had so many chances to say, ‘hey, Clint, you know your ex-girlfriend? She’s a killer assassin! Aren’t you glad I came back and rescued you?’”

“It wasn’t a rescue,” Phil says. “I know you can take care of yourself.”

“Damn right. So why didn’t you trust me with this?”

There’s only the tiniest of pauses before Phil says, “It wasn’t about trust.”

This time they’re silent for a long, long moment, and Clint almost wishes they’d had the rest of this fight at SHIELD after all, so that the lingering footsteps of too-curious agents could have provided something by way of distraction. “I didn’t want to make you choose,” Phil says, at last, and Clint waits, and waits, but when Phil’s mouth opens again, nothing comes out.

“That’s it?” Clint says, incredulous, an echo of a time when Phil’s silence meant trust and understanding, instead of whatever this is.

“That’s -- yes,” Phil says.

For the first time in a long time, Clint finds himself needing space, and Phil watches him bang out the door without comment. Clint buys himself a new toothbrush on the way back to his old, empty dorm room.

//

It’s a couple of days before “I didn’t want to make you choose” reassembles itself into “I was afraid you wouldn't choose me if there was a choice”, flashing in metaphorical neon while Clint is innocently, if bad-temperedly, munching away on another too-dry cafeteria sandwich, fresh out of a meeting where he and Phil were incredibly professional apart from the occasional difficulty making eye contact.

“Goddamnit,” he says, out loud, because Jesus, RELATIONSHIPS. “Why can’t anyone just _say what they mean_?” he adds, and he’s definitely getting some curious glances now.

It’s not that he isn’t still angry -- because he is -- but he at least feels like he understands what’s been going through Phil’s head. Mostly bullshit. He ducks into Phil’s office immediately after stuffing the remainder of his sandwich into his mouth, and settles in to wait. 

Something glittery catches his attention on one of his loops around the edges of the office, and when he leans in closer, he discovers a battered, vaguely star-shaped sticker in the corner of Phil’s diploma. It’s at that particular stage of decay when the sticker starts to ooze ancient glue onto the surface around it. He can tell this without touching it, because there’s a matching one on the outdated driver’s license he keeps in his wallet.

The door slams open and Clint startles back, hoping that Phil hasn’t caught him having a moment with his nose pressed close to an apparently mutually nostalgic sticker, but when he turns around it isn’t Phil at all.

“Hey, kiddo,” Opryshko says, which would be offensive except she calls Phil the same thing, and Clint values the way it makes Phil’s eye twitch too much to ask her to stop. “I’ve been hunting for you. What are you doing in here?”

“Waiting for Coulson to show up,” Clint says, pressing his hand to his chest; he catches himself only after he feels the too-fast _thump-thump_ of his heart.

Opryshko’s eyebrow says she’s caught the tell, but all she says is, “That’ll be a long wait,” as she steps all the way inside the office. “He got called out an hour ago, last minute; we got a lead on the Cockroach case and obviously we’re hoping to wrap that up sooner rather than later.”

“The Cockroach case?”

“Yeah, the -- are you not read in on this? International arms dealer known only as the Cockroach, strange glowing weaponry, face that no one’s ever seen and a voice that only Coulson can recognize?”

“What,” says Clint, and then, “there’s no such thing as rotating on and off international missions, is there.”

“Nope,” says Opyrshko. “Really, we’re not -- the Cockroach wasn’t included in our briefing overview because we’ve been kept at one remove from the case up until this morning. I did, however, assume that Coulson had told you something. It’s an appropriate clearance level for you.”

The expression on Clint’s face must be reflecting some of what’s going on inside his head, because Opryshko abruptly stops speaking. “Right,” she says, after a pause. “Okay, I can see that this has blindsided you, so I’m just going to --” she reaches out and grabs his arm, reels him in and then pushes him out the door. “Helicopter now,” she says. “Explanation later.”

Clint really didn’t anticipate being the open and trusting one in this relationship, holy shit. In a twisted sort of way, it almost makes him feel better, as though both of them being kind of messed up means they have a better chance of making it. He’s definitely going to revisit that thought once he stops being so furious.

When they land, Clint has time for a whole thirty seconds’ worth of facial expression-only argument with Phil about SHARING INFORMATION before they’re hustled off to their respective posts. Phil, to hide out in a van with a radio and listen intently for an exceedingly paranoid man who wears a seemingly endless set of masks, but who once accidentally answered to his own name while Phil was in earshot, and then apparently dedicated a significant set of his resources to annihilating the problem.

Clint is up a fire escape, bow in hand, his primary purpose to disable said man, although he thinks it’s really anybody’s guess as to whether disable is going to mean an arrow through the knee, or through the eye.

“I thought covert operatives weren’t supposed to be seen,” he says, conversationally.

“I got too close,” Coulson says, haltingly, over the sound of Opryshko’s enormous gusting sigh. “There were security tapes.”

“It actually explains a lot,” says Clint. “All this Coulson-related weirdness. All those people trying to kill you.”

Phil says, “Only one attempt.”

“ _That I know of_ ,” Clint says.

“Sorry,” Phil says, falling silent again, and Clint is left once again with too many feelings and not a whole lot of outlet for them. In the interests of not stewing in emotions while staying very still on the side of a building, he plays a game where he tries to name every city and town he’s slept in in the last six years, in order. The bonus round includes the people he’s slept with, which is less of a good idea because, with the exception of Natasha, most of those people are filed in a Not Phil box in his head, and then at the end it’s Phil all the way down.

Phil makes Clint want to put his feet on the ground; makes him want to meet his eyes, at eye level. No one else has ever managed that before.

“We’ll talk about it later,” Clint says, as though the conversation didn’t have a forty minute pause in the middle of it, and he doesn’t think he’s imagining the relief in Phil’s voice when he says, “Yes.”

//

Clint is, of course, off duty when everything goes wrong. 

He misses the explosions, and he’s not there when two agents have their throats slit, and by the time he arrives on-scene, hustled out of a restless nap by a panicked junior agent, Phil is long gone. They find Grieve in an alley two blocks from the surveillance van, one of Phil’s shoes clutched in his hand and a knife in his gut.

He’ll probably live. Clint holds his hand while they wait for medevac to show up and the senior agents storm around talking intensely on radio channels that Clint doesn’t have the clearance to hear. It feels like his skin is crawling, strange goosebumps up and down his arms and his legs and his spine; the forced inactivity almost nauseating.

“Don’t even think about it,” Opryshko says, appearing after they load Grieve into the ambulance, and not bothering to specify what “it” is. “We’re on this, and we’ll need you later.”

“It’s weird that there was no body,” Clint blurts. “Right? He should have been in that alley with Grieve.”

“Yes, Barton. It’s weird,” says Opryshko, and nobody’s saying, “He might still be alive,” but Clint is sure as hell thinking it. The alternative is not something to be considered. Not yet. Clint can be hopeful, just this once, just about this one thing.

“There’s no body,” he says, to himself. There’s no body.

Director Fury shows up within the hour, after they’ve decamped to a secondary safehouse -- “I was in the neighborhood,” he says, like that’s an answer -- and his unexpected presence makes Opryshko go a curdled milk sort of colour before she squares her shoulders and delivers a succinct report of events.

“Set up shop here,” he says, at the end of it. “Keep doing what you’re doing. I have a contact in the city who owes me a favour, so if we don’t end up fucking one another over I’ll have something useful by the end of the day.”

Fury has a soft spot for every agent in his arsenal. The whole of SHIELD knows this, just as they all know that Fury won’t hesitate to deploy them as necessary, even as he regrets their loss. In counterpoint, he goes above and beyond when it comes to retrieval, far past what most agencies would consider an acceptable point to cut their losses.

Like, what the fuck is the director of a covert agency doing out in the field? Clint is pretty sure that’s bizarre, even by SHIELD’s notoriously hands-on standards.

Just after the sun sets, there's a shout from the first floor, something sharp and alarmed, cut off abruptly. Clint tries to remember who's down there -- Falla and one other agent, he thinks -- but before anyone's gotten further than drawing their weapons, a second voice, the second agent, Clint thinks, calls, "Sir? The Black Widow is here to speak with you." The voice is remarkably steady for someone who is presumably standing in a room with the _Black Widow_ , killer of, well, a lot of people.

Fury mulls that over for a moment while he checks his sidearm, and then calls back, “I’ll be right down.”

Clint's not allowed downstairs for the next part, although Natasha seems to know he's there, because she tells Falla to say hello for her. "Flat on her stomach, arms behind her back, and six terrified junior agents," Falla tells him. "Not that I blame them; I'm pretty sure we have enough agents dead at her hand that it could the basis of a really depressing club."

"Why is she _here_?" Clint asks.

"Ostensibly, it's like she said -- she wants a word with Fury. She’s got a backpack that we’re scanning for explosives. Other than that -- who knows. Fury’s talking to her in the bathroom.”

“O-kay,” Cint says, drawing that word out.

“We stuck her in the bathtub once we searched her and secured all her limbs,” Falla explains. “And it’s in the middle of the house, so there’s limited access to the outside.”

“So basically what you’re saying,” Clint says, “is that a place that makes a good tornado shelter is also a good Black Widow container.”

“Widow’s probably the more destructive of the two,” Opryshko says, from the corner.

“You can’t reason with a tornado, though,” Clint says.

“You have a lot of experience ‘reasoning’ with the Widow?” says Opryshko.

“No, sir,” Clint says. “Just -- nothing.”

It’s only when Fury has extracted some manner of oath or attained some degree of satisfaction with whatever Natasha’s been saying that Clint is allowed downstairs. It takes two hours. She’s still in the bathtub, although she’s sitting upright with her hands behind her back, rather than face down. Parts of her clothes and hair -- red, this time -- have a slick, wet sheen, and after a moment Clint spots a mostly-empty bottle of baby oil sitting just outside the bathroom door. Natasha shifts, slightly, in the tub, and slides toward the tap before she manages to tip back in the other direction to stop herself. One of the juniors catches Clint looking at the baby oil and grins, wide and bright, clearly proud of himself. 

Clint doesn’t think that making the bathtub extremely slippery will actually keep Natasha down for long if she doesn’t want to be down.

“What’s the word?” Opryshko says.

“The Widow would like to come in,” Fury says.

“My previous … employers ... and I have reached an impasse,” she says. If there’s one thing Clint’s learned about Natasha, super spy assassin, it’s that, like Phil, nearly everything she does or shows to the world is a deliberate, conscious gesture. That pause is only there because she put it there. “As a gesture of good faith I have brought you the head of the man who arranged for Agent Coulson’s -- current troubles.”

Fury tilts his head and Junior Agent Baby Oil immediately scrambles away down the hall; he sprints back clutching the bag Romanoff entered the house with, which has the white tag flapping from its handle that means it’s been cleared by the explosives guys. He passes it to Opryshko, who sets it down on the floor; she and Clint kneel over it and slowly, carefully, unzip the bag.

The green backpack has a disquieting black garbage bag inside it. “I brought his hands, as well, in case you needed his fingerprints,” Natasha says.

"Dead men can't tell us what they know," Fury says, folding his arms across his chest.

"The woman who interrogated the men before they died _can_ tell you what they _knew_ ," Natasha counters. “This one had a heart condition,” she adds, almost rueful. “His death was premature.”

Clint helps Opryshko unknot the garbage bag; she holds a penlight over it and grips his shoulder hard while Clint peels back the edges, which is a helpful distraction from the anticipatory nausea. "You don't exactly have a reputation for truthfulness," Fury says.

"This is Withey," Opryshko announces. "Was Withey. He’s on the list of known associates."

"I'm looking for a change in occupation," Natasha says. "You come highly recommended." Clint can _feel_ Fury's gaze on his back, and he's relieved when Natasha adds, "He didn't give me specifics. That he's still alive and still working for you is impressive in and of itself."

"Did you really tell your employers to fuck off when you met me?” Clint says, turning all the way around to look into the room again. Fury casts him a warning glance, but doesn’t make any move to shut down the conversation.

She quirks a smile at him, but it doesn’t do much to conceal the fact that she looks like a forty-mile stretch of rough road. “No,” she says. “Before. I’m an … independent contractor.”

“Oh,” says Clint. “Pretty sure SHIELD doesn’t pay all that well.”

“Any agency file can tell you that the Widow identity works to support her own interests,” Natasha says, “not politics or misguided idealism. It’s been that way for the last thirty years. Let us say that my interests are not purely monetary.”

Fury tilts his head and Opryshko gets to her feet, bringing the backpack up with her, then strides away down the hallway, shouting for junior agents to attend to her.

“Medina,” Natasha says, shifting the conversation. “Did you see me then?”

“I didn’t. Yamagata,” Fury counters, and, when she looks blank, adds, “1963.”

Clint says, “But -- _1963_?”

“Some of your files regarding me are inaccurate,” she says.

“Tell me something I don’t know,” Fury sighs. “Barton, go put out a call. I want Agent Sitwell and his team on the ground in the next twelve hours.” Sitwell, Clint thinks, is one of Phil’s friends; he doesn’t think they’ve ever met, although water cooler gossip is under the impression that he’s some kind of wunderkind for already having a small and rag-tag team of his own to look after. Phil is -- was? _is_ \-- determined to surpass him in clearance levels and seniority.

“And when you’re done that, bring me a sandwich,” Fury says, reaching out a hand to help Natasha out of the tub. Her arms come out from behind her back, already free from the restraints. Junior Agent Baby Oil, freshly returned from the Opryshko wars, makes a disappointed, terrified sort of noise even as he holds out a satellite phone to Clint.

“I could eat,” Natasha says.

“Two sandwiches,” Fury says.

Clint says, “Sir, yes sir.”

//

Sitwell, when he shows up, seems soft and pudgy, and the round glasses make him look like he spends a lot of time squinting at computer screens. Natasha, freshly showered and providing lists of names and locations as fast as the junior agents can take them down, pauses for a moment, sizing him up, and then she says, “Zagreb?”

“My first field engagement with SHIELD,” he says, and smiles, pleased. It makes him look a little shark-like. Definitely a field agent. “I really thought you were going to kill me.”

“I don’t recall why I didn’t,” Natasha muses.

“This is a traditional covert operative game,” Opryshko tells Clint, as an aside. “International espionage makes for strange bedfellows. There’s one woman from CSIS that I’ve never seen face-to-face, but she’s beaten me to the objectives six times in the last decade. If I ever meet her I’m going to punch her in the mouth and then buy her a beer.”

Clint would honestly find this all a lot more fascinating if Phil weren’t missing presumed probably-dead, or if, perhaps, he’d slept more than three hours out of the last forty-nine. Fury left in the middle of hour thirty; Clint still hasn’t been able to work out if Natasha was the contact who owed him a favour, or if that was just serendipitous timing.

“You’re Barton, right?” Sitwell says. “Coulson’s told me a lot about you.”

“He said you went through training together,” Clint says, ignoring that second part, because normally when people have heard a lot about him it’s because he’s pissed somebody off.

“We did,” says Sitwell. “Listen -- we’ll find him. If he’s there to be found, we’ll get him back.” This is, word for word, what no fewer than four other agents have told him. Maybe it’s in the handbook that he never quite managed to finish, although the sentiment seems no less sincere for being by rote.

“Thanks,” he croaks. Natasha swings around in her chair to stare at him.

“You need sleep,” she says, which is the exact opposite of what she always said when they were sleeping together. The cognitive dissonance makes him reel a little. “Sleep,” she says, again. “We’re looking for him. We’ll talk once this is done.”

“You’re staying?”

She twists all the way around in her seat this time while Sitwell watches, clearly fascinated. “Yes, Clint.”

Clint has a feeling that the promised talk is going to be _ridiculous_ and also emotionally draining, although at the moment he can’t really imagine being more emotionally drained than he already is.

He’s shaken awake on the couch four hours later; Natasha looming over him and Sitwell and Opryshko looming over her. “We found something?” he rasps, struggling upright.

“We are going on a raid,” she says. “Would you like to come with us?”

Would he like to go on a raid. Ha.

There are four possible targets, and therefore _four_ raids, being carried out simultaneously across the city. Tasha seems to think that their group’s target has the highest likelihood of being helpful, and has therefore cherry-picked it for themselves, because she’s great like that.

She’s also _wrong_ , although they don’t discover this until they break into a recently condemned apartment building to find it empty, and Opryshko gets the radio call that Falla’s group has just dealt with an entire house full of people with high-powered guns. Speaking over the sobbing noises on the other end, Falla says, “Coulson’s alive,” and Clint lets out a breath of air that he’s been holding for the last fifty-five hours.

“Did you get him?” Opryshko demands.

“We have a location,” says Falla, “but it wasn’t the Cockroach who took him. It’s a competitor. They want Coulson to ID the Cockroach just as we did, except they were hoping to take over his business after they kill him.”

The competitor doesn’t have a nickname yet, so Clint summarily dubs him “the Rat”, a name that is adopted by the entire team after Falla informs them that Phil is being held in an underground bunker and the easiest way to get in is through the sewer system.

“Of course it is,” Sitwell says.

“Just like the movies, kids,” says Opryshko.

//

The sewer system is a clown car full of bad guys. 

Clint doesn’t make unwarranted circus references because he has mixed feelings about that time in his life, but seriously. _Swarms_ of armed men. The teams have split up again, all attempting an approach from different angles. Clint’s team went directly into the sewers and spent thirty minutes dropping down, being greeted by still more gangbangers, and then backpedalling topside again, where there’s at least enough room to maneuver. Clint can’t even imagine what the city’s civilian population thinks of this mess.

“Just a guess,” Clint says, heaving himself out of a manhole, “but I think these guys knew we were coming.”

“Opryshko, we’re-” Sitwell begins, cutting himself off with cursing and muffled gunfire. “New swarm behind us,” he continues, “I think they were from the sewer? Falla’s team is cutting them off.”

“There’s going to be a second group circling around,” Tasha says immediately, and Clint doesn’t bother wondering how she knows.

“Hawkeye,” Opryshko barks, but Clint’s already sliding back down the ladder. 

Sitwell was right; the sewer walkways are no longer active battle grounds. He jogs down, making three right turns and trying to reconcile real life with the map he’d studied. _That_ passage is waist-deep in unmentionables and doubles back, but _this_ one is littered with bodies and goes the right way, but only if he’s made every turn correctly so far...

He pauses to gather his bearings and there’s a scraping noise above him, and he looks up just in time for someone to fall on his head. His bow snaps as they both hit the ground, and the body that’s dropped on him doesn’t waste any time trying to bludgeon him to death with his fists. Clint collects little gasping breaths between hits until he finally has enough to wriggle his shoulder just so, twisting his leg around enough to unbalance his attacker.

The man remains on top of him, but Clint is exhausted and pissed off and can’t feel his face and whoever this is, they don’t stand a chance. His wrists are still caught up in a surprisingly tight grip, so he leans in and clamps his teeth down on an ear and _yanks_.

Now there’s a sense memory that’s gonna haunt him.

Disgusting as it is, it does the trick; Clint splutters while his opponent shrieks and lets go, and Clint takes advantage of that moment of agony to twist around and jack-knife his elbow into his throat. The shriek abruptly changes in tone and pitch; Clint delivers one more blow, again with his elbow, and it stops altogether.

There’s a distant sensation of falling, but a moment later Clint notices how close the floor is and deduces that he must have toppled over.

In his ear, Natasha demands, “Status!”

“M’fine,” he manages. 

“Stay down,” she says, and then the radio clicks again as she closes her line.

He can hear the fighting going on above him. From the sounds of it, Agent Opryshko and Natasha are more than holding their own. In between the cursing from the assholes, the two of them are engaging in some sort of witty back-and-forth. He can’t quite make out what they’re saying, but they seem to be having a good time. Certainly better than the one he’s having down here.There’s something sitting on his foot and he _knows_ that if he looks it will turn out to be a rat.

“Stay down,” Natasha said, but Clint thinks she only meant “stay down until you can stand up again”, and Clint’s never been one to lie in ominous dark water and sludge on cold cement for long. This is actually his very first time in a sewer, and it’s pretty much everything he thought it would be. He thinks Phil would be surprised by that. Not the expectations part, the being in a sewer before part. Fuck, fuck, _focus_.

He sits up, which is fucking agony; it aches just to breathe but actually deliberately trying to use the muscles in his chest is about six times more awful. No broken ribs, he thinks; he’s had those, and they’re worse. He waggles his foot -- which hurts -- and the not-so-mysterious weight disappears with a bit of a splash. He gets to his knees -- which hurts -- and uses the side of the tunnel to pull himself -- painfully -- to his feet. “I have been _shot_ before, he tells his body. “Suck it up.” He’s a total liar; he’s never been shot before. Buck was gonna try but Clint kicked him in the dick after the arm-stomping and then threw himself out a window.

Focus.

He’s standing. Where is his bow? He’s lost his bow. There’s a fight going on above his head. He’s in a sewer. Phil is close. Phil is _alive_.

“Still alive down there?” Sitwell asks in his ear. Right, open comm lines. He hopes he wasn’t making the little gasping noises on his journey to uprightness that he thinks he might have been.

“Yeah,” he says. It comes out raspy, but raspy is better than full-of-sewer-sludge-phlegmy. “Phase two?”

“Phase two,” Sitwell agrees.

To Clint’s eternal relief, his most recent sewer friend appears to be the last actively homicidal hurdle on the path to Coulson; he sees other people only from a distance for the next twenty minutes. He’s flagging badly by the time his mental schematic informs him he’s almost there, but the thought of Coulson, theoretically alive but not necessarily well, waiting for Clint to appear, spurs him onward.

Wriggling through to the last access point actually reminds him of his time in various ductwork in SHIELD’s old buildings, and of watching the top of Coulson’s head as he patiently searched libraries and courthouses and parks for Clint.

He peers into the room -- a single guard, no firearms in sight -- and bursts out of the drain in the floor, swinging himself up and his legs out, taking the guard out at the knees and pushing him over to smack his head into the cement wall. He pauses just long enough to confiscate weapons -- a single, nasty-looking blade, but no gun -- and then he’s through one last door into a much smaller space, dimly lit by a single lightbulb. 

There’s a man, lying on the floor. One foot is clad in only a grimy, filthy sock. His chest rises up and down. “I got him,” Clint breathes into his radio, and Sitwell says, “Teams two and three are clearing out the bunker now. Get him towards daylight.”

“Copy,” Clint says, and then, “Coulson?”

Phil sits up very, very fast, then immediately goes chalky and slumps back down again. “Ow,” he says, plaintively. His arms go up in the air and wave around a bit, like he’s five and wants Clint to come over and pick him up, except when Clint drops to his knees beside him, Phil just puts one hand at the back of Clint’s neck and pulls him in for the most awkward and satisfying hug of Clint’s life to date.

“Hi,” Phil says, right next to Clint’s ear. He’s gotten kind of beardy in his absence. It tickles.

“Hi,” Clint says, and decides he can take a moment to rest his forehead against Phil’s shoulder and bask in the feeling of all being right in the world, even covered in shit and surrounded by people who want to kill them.

The first time Clint saw Coulson, a lone junior agent sitting hunched over in a grimy booth under a set of flickering fluorescents, he hadn’t been very impressed. He’d noticed, although only distantly -- distracted by the way his entire life had so recently gone completely to hell -- that Phil was attractive in a baby-faced, fluffy sort of way.

Clint honestly can’t imagine life without him. Today, he doesn’t have to.

He pulls back, bringing Phil to his feet with him, and pats his cheek, gently. He’d kiss him, too, except they’re both grimy enough to make it not just gross, but possibly dangerous. 

“Grieve? The other agents?”

“Grieve is supposed to pull through. The two who were in the van with you didn’t make it.”

Phil closes his eyes for a moment, then nods, slowly. “I remember that.”

“Yeah. You good to go?”

“Soooo good,” Phil says. There’s sorrow there, still clouding his face, but he’s also smiling at Clint like Clint’s something wonderful, and Clint, well, he’s even starting to believe it. “I knew you’d come,” Phil says.

“Of _course_ I came. But I'm still pissed at you,” Clint adds, quickly, and literally hears Phil’s face fall. This is a pretty solid indication that Clint is experiencing auditory hallucinations and that blow to the head was a lot harder than he'd thought. “You have issues, you know that?”

“I really intended to tell you,” Phil says, and falls over.

“Which part,” Clint says. He reaches down to help Phil up, but his first grab for Phil’s arm misses entirely. The situation is somewhat reminiscent of their first pseudo-mission together: Clint, concussed and bleeding and full of foolish decisions; Phil, knight in shining armour. They have all the same elements! Except this time, Clint gets to be the concussed knight in shining armour, and Phil gets to be full of foolish decisions and leaking blood from his forehead.

“Both parts,” Phil says, hobbling forward like a pro, one arm slung over Clint’s shoulder. “Well. All three parts.”

“Are you concussed,” Clint says, just in case.

“No,” says Phil. “I’m sorry. Is this a bad time?”

Clint considers this. “Nah,” he decides. “I bet we can multitask. Go on. You’re full of regrets.”

“I should have told you that people were trying to kill me.”

“Oh my god, more parallels!” Clint says, which isn’t fair to Phil because Phil’s missed the entire conversation Clint’s been having in his head. “Go on.”

“I was embarrassed. It was work, but it was also personal. You deserved to know. I also meant to tell you that your girlfriend Natasha was a terrifying assassin.”

“Not exactly my girlfriend,” Clint says, “but go on.” They stagger down the hallway together, past a lot of flashing lights. All the alarms are very noisy, but when they lean their heads close together they don’t even have to shout.

“I meant to tell you that I’m -- maybe we shouldn’t do this here,” Phil says, abruptly, and then yanks Clint’s sidearm out of its holster, clicking the safety and aiming at the goon rounding the corner ahead of them. The gun doesn’t fire -- “Sewer sludge,” Clint groans -- and so Phil chucks it instead. It hits the guy’s head and he goes down like what Phil actually did was shoot him.

“Nice,” Clint says, appreciatively.

“I worry that you feel beholden to me,” Phil says. They relieve the goon of his non-sewer-sludged weaponry and distribute it amongst themselves. “The last thing I want is for you to feel like you need to stay because you owe me.”

“Less nice,” Clint says. “I’m capable of making my own decisions.”

“I _know_ ,” Phil says. “But you’re loyal. I didn’t want you to choose SHIELD because we helped you and then resent us for taking you away from the Widow. I didn’t want you to feel like you needed to stick around to protect me because I made a stupid mistake in the field, and I looked after you, once.”

“Is that also why you sent me away when Fury asked me to join?”

“ _Yes,_ ” Phil says, sounding relieved, as though this is something that’s been weighing on him.

“We really should have had this conversation, like, five years ago, buddy,” Clint says. “Or when we started sleeping together.”

“I know,” says Phil, relief making way for crestfallen. “No gold stars for me.”

Clint says, “Are you _sure_ you didn’t hit your head?”

“Our lives are very busy and very strange,” Phil muses as they round the corner and discover six SHIELD agents dashing their way, which Clint takes for a yes. They hold hands all through the ambulance ride, and the helicopter ride, and it’s incredibly unprofessional but it’s also become clear to Clint that there’s never an easy line between what’s personal and what’s work.

Clint’s okay with that. He’s pretty sure it’s worth it.

//

Phil gets a steady stream of visitors during his two-day stint in the hospital, Clint a glowering shadow at his side.

“You have your own bed,” Phil points out, early in the first day.

“Gave it away, “Clint says, leaning back in the chair he’d commandeered, and he props his socked feet in Phil’s lap while Phil mutters but makes no move to get rid of him. 

One of the visitors is Director Fury, who drops by with Natasha and casually mentions that he unmasked and took out the Cockroach while everyone was busy being distracted by Phil.

“Oh, yeah,” Clint says, when he notices Phil eyeing Natasha like he wants to ask what the fuck is going on, but doesn’t want to show any sort of weakness. “Nat decided to join us while you were gone.”

“Did she,” Phil says.

“Nice to officially meet you,” Natasha says, and leans across Clint to shake the hand that isn’t attached to medical equipment. Phil twitches but he lets her do it, even pumps her hand up and down a couple times himself when she starts to pull back.

“Good to have you on board,” he says. He shoots Fury a suspicious look, but Fury just shrugs back at him like it’s not at all unusual that the number four on SHIELD’s most wanted list just helped save the day. Maybe it isn’t, for SHIELD.

“Looking forward to having you back on your feet, Coulson,” says Fury. “Big plans, remember?”

“How could I forget,” Phil says.

“Take care, Barton,” Fury says, already halfway out the door, and Natasha sticks around for another ten minutes to chat, making Phil increasingly still and quiet, before she ruffles Clint’s hair and heads out the door herself.

Clint leans in and puts his head against Phil’s shoulder so he doesn’t have to look him in the face. It’s an awkward angle that tugs on the strained muscles in his chest, but the pull and stretch is also vaguely satisfying. “Was that jealousy, Coulson?”

“I missed all the parts where she dramatically switched sides,” Phil says. When he inhales it bumps his shoulders up a little, nudging Clint’s head. “I think I can be forgiven for being a little jumpy.”

“Uh huh. You love me,” Clint sing-songs, and the rise-and-fall of Phil’s chest stops abruptly. The pause draws out, strange, and then tip-toes right into uncomfortable. “Uh.”

“No,” Phil says, “no no, I mean, yes, but are you sure you wanna do this here?” His gesture takes in the scuffed linoleum floor, as well as Agents Grieve and Falla, not bothering to pretend not to be paying attention through the gap in the partitioning curtain.

“I’m gone for PT in an hour if you really want to wait,” Grieve rasps.

Phil’s expression, when Clint lifts his head to check, has gone ominously determined. He puts one hand at the back of Clint’s neck, thumb stroking gently at the short hairs there. “No,” he says. “Clint. My life took a turn for the bizarre the day I met you.”

“I give you two out of ten points for style,” Falla says.

Clint can feel his smile growing, passing through small and discrete and right through into shit-eating. He leans in and presses his lips to Phil’s, briefly; they’re a little dry and chapped but open immediately to let him in, familiar and exciting all at once. Phil smiles back at him.

“Go on,” Clint says.

//

Thirty stories above the ground, the air gets a little colder. The wind is brisk, and does its level best to push-pull anyone unfortunate enough to be caught out in it over the edge of the building. Clint plants one foot on the raised lip of the roof, and leans over carefully to catch a glimpse of the street below.

The two tiny dots in the middle of the now-empty intersection are the source of the voices in his ear, arguing with increasing vehemence.

“We have it handled, Mr Stark,” Phil is saying in the same level tone of voice he uses when Clint throws himself off of things or into things and generally makes a mess of all of Phil’s careful plans.

“Nuh uh. This is _my_ city. Your Strategic Homeland Whatever can play support staff all you want, but we all know I’m the only one with the resources and the knowledge to deal with this.”

_This_ being the enormous flying lizard-thing that appeared out of thin air about two hours ago, prompting yet another round of jaded New Yorker “seriously? Again?” conversations. It spits acid when harassed by well-meaning fighter jets and news helicopters, and so Clint is up high with a quiver of arrows carrying a tranquilizer payload. Iron Man, a mere three weeks out of his Who Gives a Fuck About Secret Identities press conference, showed up to play with his usual sense of flair. Even all the way up here, Clint can still hear the faint sound of heavy rock being blasted at an ear-drum-shattering volume. Nat would have something suitably witty and cutting to say about that; Clint is mostly just amused.

“I thought you were living in Malibu,” Phil says.

“I own property in multiple cities,” Stark says. “And they’re all _mine_.”

Clint shifts his attention from the street and back up to the skies as the sound of a now-familiar rumbling begins to draw closer. “I’m calling it a dragon,” he decides. “You can’t stop me.”

“Yes, fine,” Phil sighs, right in the middle of arguing semantics of ownership with Stark, who falls abruptly silent and then demands, “Who are you talking to?”

“Got it?” Phil says.

Clint draws back on his bow while inhaling deeply, wincing a little at the chill, and then slowly, slowly, exhales, following the trajectory of the beast. SHIELD has run countless tests on him over the last decade and change, trying to discover how he does what he does (and, obviously, whether they can bottle it up and give it to other agents), but the consensus has been that there’s something predictive and instinctual that happens inside Clint’s brain when he’s lining up a shot, and nobody can replicate it to his level.

“Got it,” he says, on the last puff of breath, and lets go. The dragon wavers up and down for a moment, wings pumping, and then it drops like a stone. It tumbles through the air, buffeted by the heavy winds as its wings flare and catch at it, and it skids to a long, drawn-out halt down the normally busy New York street that Phil had cleared of civilians thirty minutes ago.

“Nicely done, Hawkeye,” Phil says. His tiny dot is trotting rapidly toward the crash site. Clint can hear the smile in his voice. He wonders if Stark can, too; the Iron Man suit took off almost before the dragon landed, searching across building rooftops for -- well, for Clint. He waves to catch his attention.

“Thank you, dear,” Clint says.

“Who is that?” Stark says, and then, as he apparently catches sight of Clint’s waving arm and darts closer to hover in front of him, just over the side of the roof, “Who is this, Agent Coulson? And why is he holding a goddamn bow?”

“That would be my partner,” Phil says into the comm line.

Clint’s spent a lot of time listening to Phil not-complain about Tony Stark over the last month, and this and his own sense of the dramatic, finely honed and difficult to shake, is what prompts him to step fully up onto the lip of the roof, arms spread for balance and smile wide, bow clenched tight in one hand.The grappling hook is already firmly in place, but Stark doesn’t need to know that.

“ _Life_ partner,” Clint adds, and jumps.

He suspects, even years later, that Tony never quite forgives them for that introduction.

**Author's Note:**

> You know, I'm actually stunned I finished it.


End file.
